The Rust Maidens Read online

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  Not every house had one, but there were enough of them to stir alarm in my guts. I stared at the signs, one after another, trying to divine their meaning until the truth flooded into me. The tourists needed somewhere to stay. And why let the out-of-towners go into the city when they could stay right here amongst the Rust Maidens themselves, the star attraction? I shuddered. The girls were becoming a cottage industry in spite of themselves.

  Down the block, the congregation poured into the Presbyterian Church, and I waited on the lawn, desperate for some sign of Jacqueline.

  But when Aunt Betty arrived, she was alone.

  “Where is she?” I asked, blocking her path.

  “Sick,” she said, and pushed past me into the church.

  The strident bells rang out in the steeple, and I stood, defeated on the steps. Poor Jacqueline. Too “sick” even for the Lord’s blessing.

  Inside, everything was normal, so long as you didn’t look too hard.

  In the back, several blue-haired ladies arranged stale cookies on paper plates. Usually the goodies were free, but today, with so many “newcomers”—the kind with cameras and greedy faces—the congregation was planning for its biggest bake sale of the year.

  “To raise funds for a new roof,” the women whispered, and I hated them almost as much as the tourists.

  As I expected, the rest of the Rust Maidens were here. Kathleen and her father flanked Lisa, whose wild eyes glistened like moonstone.

  Doctor Ross and his wife and Violet, with her arms pricked and prodded and bandaged back up again.

  Dawn, her face all shadows as she fidgeted in the pew, far from Clint’s family and baby Eleanor.

  The pastor’s family in the front row. His always-smiling wife sitting next to Helena, with her pink cheeks and straight teeth and dressed collarbone oozing melancholy.

  But this was a normal day, our parents had decided. So we listened to the sermon and crooned “How Great Thou Art” and smiled at our neighbors as if they were our friends.

  The girls, however, knew better. They seemed to float above it all. I hunkered down in my seat and watched them. When she thought no one was looking, Helena glanced down the pew at Violet, who flashed her a small smile back. Then Violet looked at Dawn, who didn’t smile, but didn’t frown either. A lightness came to her face anytime the other girls were watching her, almost like she felt seen for the first time in her life. And Lisa, the strange one, the girl who knew better than anybody, sat back, observing the other three, grinning to herself.

  I wondered what Jacqueline would see, what she could tell me if she were here, instead of resting alone at home, cross-legged in bed, shipwrecked from the world.

  The pastor continued to drone on. “The Lord speaks to Samuel of acceptance when he says that—”

  In the back, a tourist’s camera flashed, and I grunted. Acceptance. That word was a talon raked on the inside of my chest. None of this was about acceptance. It was about bake sales and a lunch counter at capacity and extra rooms rented out in a time of need. The Rust Maidens shouldn’t be accepted because it was the right thing to do. The Rust Maidens should be accepted because they were good for business.

  The sermon ended early, but I didn’t wait in line with the others for cups of burnt coffee and overdone chocolate chip cookies. Instead, I marched home alone, and climbed up into my treehouse. I was eighteen years old, an adult, a woman if that was what you wanted to call me, and all I wanted to do on this Sunday morning was sulk like a child.

  But I didn’t sulk, not when I saw it there, waiting for me in the center of the treehouse. A sign from her, from Jacqueline. A triple moon etched into the floorboards.

  This was our secret code. Freshman year, we’d found a picture of it in an old book about symbology tucked away in the back room of the school library.

  “That mark is the devil’s doing,” Aunt Betty had said when she found Jacqueline and me doodling it on the margins of our notebooks, and that was all the encouragement we needed to adopt the sign as our own. Anything to vex her mother.

  Jacqueline had been here. While I was gone, she’d been in the treehouse. These butterflies had probably nestled in her hair, and the wooden boards beneath my feet had lurched with her weight. Maybe she’d taken a sip from the tartan thermos. Maybe she’d called my insects by their names. This wasn’t so different. In a way, everything was normal. Everything was like before.

  I needed to see her. It was what I wanted, and what Jacqueline wanted too. My head high, I went to her. I marched up her front steps, and knocked on the door. But, of course, she didn’t answer. I glared at the one who did.

  “She wants to talk to me,” I said.

  Aunt Betty snapped her tongue, one hand still on the door, ready to slam it at a moment’s notice. “Really?”

  “Please, just let me see her for a minute.” I hated myself for standing there and begging for what she had no right to deny. “You can be with us the whole time.”

  She snuffed out a laugh. “I don’t think so,” she said, and the door swung closed in my face.

  That was when I saw them, glinting there in front of me. The silver locks installed on the outside. Ones that Aunt Betty could latch and unlatch when she left the house. This was what she had always wanted—to seal Jacqueline off from me and everyone else. To keep her safe in a way no one could ever keep my uncle safe.

  But I couldn’t leave my best friend here. I couldn’t abandon her to whatever Aunt Betty thought was best. She wouldn’t have a chance if I did.

  My eyes blurred with tears, and I paced back and forth on the sidewalk. The government men’s house loomed over me. Beneath the dripping gutters, a piece of old lattice sprawled sullenly in the former owner’s garden. I stared at it, a plan swirling in my head. I could reach Jacqueline. It wasn’t the best way, but maybe now, with everything that had happened, it was the only way.

  I decided to wait until dusk to return. It seemed safer somehow with the evening as my unlikely accomplice, concealing me from my aunt. I would get to Jacqueline. We just needed a few more hours. I’d save her from this nightmare.

  ***

  For Sunday dinner, my mother cooked honey-glazed ham and mashed potatoes with too much butter, and I had to sit there at the table and pretend we were a family.

  “We still need to change the oil in the Impala,” my father said to me. “Otherwise, that hunk of junk won’t make it down the block.”

  I shrugged, not looking at him. “You’re right. It probably won’t make it down the block,” I said. “It won’t make it anywhere. None of us will.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have said anything. My parents certainly didn’t speak again, not for the rest of the overcooked meal and not when I told them I was going out for the night.

  “See you later,” I said, and slammed the door behind me.

  Out in the darkness, I crept through backyards until I reached the government men’s house. Not making a sound, I grabbed the piece of discarded lattice. Then, with a steady hand, I leaned it against Jacqueline’s house like a ladder and started climbing.

  Above me, the curtains in her bedroom fluttered. I neared the top, almost close enough to touch her window. Jacqueline was right there, that face that looked so different but still looked like her. She pressed her fingers into the glass, and I reached out, wanting to hold her hand, wanting to be there to do something, anything, for her. But as my palm pressed into the window, the lattice lurched beneath me. I froze, convinced that if I was entirely still, it would be enough to stop the inevitable.

  It wasn’t. The thin wood, already half-decayed, crumbled into dust beneath my feet, and I had just enough time to imagine how much it was going to hurt before I fell.

  The crash of my body shook the earth. I landed right next to the porch, close enough to the front door that there was no way Aunt Betty didn’t hear me. But I couldn’
t run. Curled in the overgrown grass, I could barely move. A gash six inches long bisected my calf.

  Above me, the porch light flicked on, and Aunt Betty’s voice sliced through the night.

  “I told you I’d call the police, Phoebe,” she said.

  I folded into myself and wished I could disappear. She’d find me here. There was no way to hide.

  But then something rustled nearby in the grass, and Adrian was suddenly standing next to me. He leaned against the porch balusters, making him the first thing she saw instead of her wayward niece, bleeding and coiled on the ground.

  “Good evening, Betty.” With one hand, Adrian waved at her, and with the other dangling at his back just out of her sight, he motioned me on. I dragged what was left of me around the house and into the shadows. Their voices echoed in the dark, and I held my breath and listened.

  “I heard something, I’m sure of it,” Aunt Betty said.

  “Just me doing the rounds.” I imagined Adrian flashing her that smile of his. He was skilled at convincing people he had good intentions. He almost had me believing him.

  “Have you seen my niece out there?” she asked.

  “Not tonight. Why? Do you have a message for her?”

  I had to bite down hard to stifle a laugh. Aunt Betty with a message for me. The most she had to say were a few poorly-veiled insults and certain four-letter words.

  Out front, they said their stiff goodbyes, and I tried to limp around the house and back to the street, but a shadow moved across my face. I looked up to find Adrian staring down at me.

  “You’ll need something for that,” he said, and for once, I couldn’t argue with him.

  He helped me inside, into the place I still considered the abandoned house next door. But it wasn’t abandoned, not anymore. It belonged to the government now. Just like the Rust Maidens. Just like the rest of us.

  Upstairs, the single exposed bulb in the bathroom bathed our skin in jaundiced yellow. Adrian leaned over me as he cleaned the dirt and bits of grass out of the cut. He smelled of cedar and starched linens still dangling from the line. I stank of blood and iodine and fresh bandages. His fault, since he was the one wrapping me up. My fault, since I was the one who fell in the first place. No matter what I wanted, I could try a thousand times, a thousand different ways, and still fail.

  I waited for him to bargain with me again.

  I helped you tonight. Why don’t you help me, Phoebe? Why don’t you help them?

  But he didn’t make any requests. He just finished patching me up and tucked the iodine and the leftover roll of bandages back into the cabinet.

  My toes wiggled on the tile as I flexed and unflexed my injured calf. Now I was just another Denton Street girl, looking like an open wound. I’d have to sneak inside the house tonight if I was going to avoid questions from my mother about what happened.

  Adrian escorted me back downstairs, but when I got to the door, he touched my arm to stop me.

  “Just so you know,” he said, “the doctors set up appointments for all the girls next week. Maybe you can talk to Jacqueline then.”

  A knot formed in my throat. “Appointments?”

  “At the clinic downtown,” he said. “The doctors aren’t making progress with their home visits, so they want to run a few more tests.”

  Tests. What that could mean was anybody’s guess.

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

  That night I slept in the treehouse again, and didn’t awaken until my mother’s voice called out for me.

  “Phoebe, we need you to come down.”

  In the living room, my parents were already dressed for the day. Now I had to get dressed too. It was a morning of solidarity, when the families joined the fathers on the picket line.

  “All the wives and children will be there today,” my father said flatly.

  I hesitated. “All of them?”

  “Every one of them,” my mother said and poured herself a drink. “That means Lisa and Dawn too.”

  I heaved down an uneven breath. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  My father wouldn’t look at me. “Would you rather we ignore them?”

  I knew what he really meant. What would make you happy, Phoebe? Is there anything that we can do with those girls that you won’t complain about?

  I shook my head. “I just don’t think we should put them on display.”

  This whole street was becoming a zoo, a menagerie of girls, and it was all so terribly wrong. We were supposed to love them, not sell tickets to their destruction. But that didn’t seem to matter, not when bake sales and makeshift bed-and-breakfasts were the order of the day.

  At the steel mill, a crowd of two hundred had already formed by the time the families arrived to support our fathers. Photographers from The Plain Dealer and The Post-Gazette and The Times were there, official badges dangling around their necks like limp nooses, but they had to get in line with the other tourists. There was no special VIP treatment for those who boasted credentials and had planned to be here to cover the labor strike, even before the girls got sick and became the featured entertainment.

  Alongside our fathers, we gathered next to a rusted chain-link fence that separated us from the mill. All of us pretended this was the same as always, and that we only had an audience because these spectators cared about things like unions and fair wages and sticking it to the man. The strike routine was simple enough: there were signs and chants and garbage tossed at the scabs, those men foolish enough to cross the picket lines as temporary workers for the mill.

  “Traitors,” our fathers yelled, and I wondered what they knew of the word.

  All the while, Lisa and Dawn wandered. The tourists and photographers oscillated between pictures of our fathers and pictures of these wraiths, their bodies swathed in bandages as if prepared for ceremonial burial.

  In the midst of the crowd, I closed my eyes and struggled to catch my breath. When I looked again, Lisa was standing right in front of me. Her face glimmered in the sunlight, the skin across her cheekbones stretched taut, revealing something the color of pewter beneath.

  She smiled, and her thin, glinting lips flashed at me. All the skin had peeled away from her mouth, and now her lips were like mirrors, reflecting me back at myself.

  “None of them know yet, do they?” she whispered, a faint sound of gravel in her voice.

  I stared at her. “Know what?”

  “That it’s all too late.” She leaned toward me, and I inhaled the scents of brackish water and earth and heat. “But you know, don’t you, Phoebe?”

  “No,” I said, my throat dry. “I don’t.

  “Sure you do. Even if you don’t want to admit it.” She smiled again, but I wouldn’t look at her lips this time, at the distorted funhouse version of myself.

  “Lisa,” I started to say, but then she was gone, vanished back into the throng without another word.

  Nobody heard her speak to me. They were too busy with our new guests. The mill owners had appeared on the other side of the fence, wearing their polyester suits and their phony smiles.

  “We want you all back at work as soon as possible,” they said. “But you’ll have to be reasonable.”

  Reasonable to them meant fewer bonuses, fewer benefits, and most of all, fewer workers. Our fathers hollered insults, and the mill owners shouted them down with niceties and lies, and no one noticed the tiny, wet girl snake her way through the crowd. Not until Lisa had stepped forward and was already at the rusted chain-link fence did anybody realize she was there at all.

  “Is that one of them?” a mill owner whispered to another, and they all nodded, their eyes wide, the thick sinews in their thicker necks pulsing.

  Lisa smiled, vaguely content they’d recognized her. But she wasn’t done. She reached out slowly, her ridged fingers almost uncertain of themselves, like she was testing out a theory for the first time. Apparently it worked, because all at once, her hand went right through the fence. I stumble
d back a step, not ten feet away from her. This couldn’t be real. It wasn’t that her fingers went into the gaps in the links, but her fingers went into the links themselves, her metallic bones fusing with steel.

  She pulled out her hand and did it again. Over and over, her skin letting out wet popping sounds each time.

  A shiver ran through the crowd. This was everything we didn’t need. I felt my body rise up, and I wanted to run to Lisa, to stop her before it had gone too far. But it was already too late. They’d seen it. Everyone here, the tourists and the reporters and our own families, had witnessed what she could do. My parents were here as well, their mouths as slack as the rest.

  And the girls weren’t done yet. From the edges of the throng, Dawn emerged. Lisa, with her eyes glinting, held out her free hand. Like a friend. Like a sister. Together, the two girls stood at the chain-link, and Dawn’s hand plunged into the metal the same as Lisa’s. They were both in front of it and part of it.

  No one moved or spoke or even took a breath. Not until Kathleen broke the stillness with a wail.

  “Lisa, baby!” She shoved through the crowd and threw her own body around her sister’s, as if she could conceal what Lisa had done. “Come away from there, okay?”

  Quivering, Kathleen led Lisa away, but even while her older sister looked ready to break into pieces, Lisa wasn’t the same. Her shoulders back, she glanced at me as she brushed past. The stillness on her face, how perfectly gratified she looked with what had happened, left me chilled, and I turned away under the weight of her impossible stare.

  As the two Carter girls disappeared into the already ruined day, the mill owners huddled together, murmuring in wild collusion. Their faces white as blank paper, they whispered and nodded and nearly screamed before rushing as a group into the building, back to their air-conditioned offices where no teenagers could hurt them. They didn’t turn back once.

  At first, I was certain this was why the girls had done it. To spook the mill owners. But no, that couldn’t be it. Lisa and Dawn had barely looked at them. They’d focused instead on each other. This had nothing to do with the steel mill or our fathers or the reporters from major newspapers. The girls did this because they wanted to. Just to see if they could.